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Poster: kracher Date: Mar 21, 2021 3:00pm
Forum: texts Subject: Book Spines

When I go to a physical library, I browse the books by their spines.
When I look at the physical books I own, I look at their spines first.
But we cannot do this for Internet Archive ebooks, because their spines are not scanned or photographed.

Would it not be possible to take a picture of a book's spine when it is being scanned, and add that to the images stored for it ?

Would it also be possible to take a single photo with the spines of a lot of books already scanned and in the archive, and split that up by hand into a spine image for each book ?

TIA,

Kracher

[ I posted this previously in another forum, but it got no response there, retrying here. ]

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Poster: syzygos Date: Apr 3, 2021 11:06am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book Spines

I really don't see the advantage of having images of spines. IA is not a physical library, so the way you browse is of necessity different. Besides, there are a lot of older books in the collections of IA that don't always have useful information on the spine or even none at all. The current system whereby you can usually see the title page is pretty good. If it ain't broke, don't fix it.

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Poster: syzygos Date: Apr 3, 2021 11:17am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book Spines

The collection: https://archive.org/details/bibliothequesaintegenevievelivres
(Bibliothèque Sainte Geneviève) does have images of spines in the file for each book. But I still don't see how that would help.
Look at the spine of this book for instance:
https://archive.org/details/4BB116INV328RES/mode/2up
It won't tell you anything useful.
'Nuf said

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Poster: R Pal Date: Apr 4, 2021 6:01am
Forum: texts Subject: Re: Book Spines are very useful

Many of the books printed in the early 1900's have information on the spines and paper covers that does not exist inside the book pages. A great deal of knowledge is lost when these covers are not scanned.

It would also be possible to have a "Library Shelf" feature here at the Archive. This would be a virtual view of book shelves using the scaned spines. A lot less screen space would be needed and browsing might be more enjoyable.